Spending Review set to expand Community Budgets

31 May 13
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has indicated the government will expand the number of ‘whole place’ Community Budgets in next month’s Spending Review.

By Richard Johnstone | 31 May 2013

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has indicated the government will expand the number of ‘whole place’ Community Budgets in next month’s Spending Review.

In a speech to the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce yesterday, Alexander said the initiative to merge all public spending into one local account had proved ‘you can deliver better public services with less money’. Community budgets were piloted in Greater Manchester, Cheshire West & Chester council, the west London tri-borough project and Essex, and are now being implemented.

The initial version of the pooled budgets, aimed at helping troubled families, had led to ‘better results’ by joining up a host of public services, Alexander added. ‘We will be taking these lessons from Greater Manchester and the other Community Budget pilot areas and applying them across the whole of the country in the Spending Round,’ he said.

Chancellor George Osborne will announce the details of the Spending Review on June 26, setting out Whitehall departmental budgets for 2015/16.

Alexander also said the government was examining potential capital spending increases in the review.

Earlier this week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development called on the government to shift more public funds to infrastructure investment to boost growth prospects.

Alexander said the Treasury had announced a reallocation of around £13bn to capital projects over the past two years, and would ‘continue to show flexibility wherever it is needed, and to shift resources wherever we can’.

The Spending Review would set out the government’s infrastructure spending plans to the end of the decade, he added. 

‘We will be taking a zero-based approach throughout, asking departments to justify the economic value of every single line of their capital budgets.

‘When we took such an approach in 2010, it resulted in the most economically important areas being prioritised.’

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